White Hills – H-p1 - June 2011 June 5th, 2011

Great! A new White Hills album. Objectivity is suspended as the Brooklyn four piece grind their guitars, heavy Seventies Detroit scum punk style, whilst keeping a stormy weather eye on appropriate egghead art strategies. Thus, the seven minute locked groove of The Condition Of Nothing, a super-dense hard rock drone, abruptly dissolves into the bell…

Boris – Heavy Rocks 2011 - May 2011 May 25th, 2011

On Heavy Rocks, the durable Japanese trio Boris interrogate and deform standard metal, underground and hard rock moves to the point where they become borderline avant-garde gestures. Riot Sugar is a pulsating riff that resolutely refuses to evolve. Leak-Truth Yesnoyesnoyes begins with the explosive psychedelic wig out you usually find at the end of a…

The BellRays – Black Lightning - May 2011 May 25th, 2011

For two decades The BellRays have sounded like a cranked up Seventies Detroit scuzz band fronted by a Sixties soul belter. When the reformed MC5 toured with replacement vocalists The Bellrays’ Lisa Kekaula gave her best punk rock Aretha. Their fourteenth album varies the mix with the big funk of Sun Comes Down, the showboating…

Thurston Moore – Demolished Thoughts - May 2011 May 22nd, 2011

For over two decades, Sonic Youth’s ageless hipster Thurston Moore has pursued stylistically disparate side-projects, from jazz noise to finger-picked folk. Now he alights upon acoustic balladry, a scoundrel’s last refuge. Samara Lubelski’s pellucid cello plugs gaps gaping for guitar feedback, and Moore’s inescapable downtown sensibilities create an urban-pastoral hybrid. Circulation pulsates unamplified on the…

Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds – Gorilla Rose - May 2011 May 22nd, 2011

Kid Congo was a guitarist for hire for Nick Cave, The Gun Club and The Cramps, teaching rock and roll licks to punks who were too cool for school. His latest album skews a solid foundation of rockabilly rhythms and twangsome strings with strange, echoing, repetitive vocal phrases and surging high end noise, like Kraftwerk…

Various Artists – Doug Shipton presents Dedicated Swallower Of Fashion - May 2011 May 16th, 2011

Doug Shipton roots resolutely through second hand shops worldwide, scoring impossible obscurities for the Finders Keepers label, which offloads Hungarian Seventies funk, Turkish Sixties psychedelia, Australian biker movie soundtracks, Czech prog, and Iranian acid-folk onto jaded hipsters. Diggers like Shipton seem drawn, almost morbidly, to the vainglorious attempts by artists far from the perceived epicentres…